In Defense of The Walking Dead

Fans of AMC's hit zombie series are frothing mad about the show's slower, milder second season. Too much talk! Not enough blown-off undead heads! Now for a dissenting opinion from GQ's culture critic: The Walking Dead has never been better

Even though it's still a hit ratings-wise, people are getting cranky about AMC's zombie epic The Walking Dead. Ken Tucker of Entertainment Weekly, who's probably the most astute TV critic around, sounds ready to give up: "The show has turned into a nighttime soap with occasional appearances by deceased but moving, flesh-rotting, flesh-eating cameo monsters." Plenty of grumbling elsewhere, too: "hey, walking dead. so now you're a morality play? um, can we get back to the part where you were scary? and exciting?" one displeased fan tweeted after last Sunday's midseason finale, voicing a common complaint judging from a roundup of audience reacts in The Hollywood Reporter. I'm starting to feel like a real fool for still being into the damn thing.

In fact, meet one of those lonesome people who thinks The Walking Dead's second season has improved on its first. I've got nothing against soap opera, which is just the pejorative term for the same character-driven dynamics that get TV viewers hooked on everything from Survivor to The Sopranos. On top of that, I'm an unreconstructed fan of the kind of old-school action saga in which the point of dire situations isn't just to give viewers thrills, but to test an unlikely batch of peoples' mettle and let 'em each find out what they're made of. That's been this season's specialty, from Dale's (Jeffrey DeMunn) cross-currents of dejection and wiliness in coping with a world he abominates to Shane's (Jon Bernthal) increasingly assertive savagery in a world he can't quite admit suits the blunt-edged weapon he calls his brain to a T.

True, once the need to hunt for the missing Sophia marooned everybody at the Greene family farm for the duration, the show gave up one of its surefire sources of Road Warrior pizzazz—namely, that bedraggled caravan on the move through one devastated, potentially zombie-riddled landscape after another. The static setting annoyed the bejesus out of some viewers, and those weekly "Your people will have to move on" chats between family patriarch Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson) and guilt-wracked Sheriff Rick (Andrew Lincoln) did have their wearying side. So did contrivances like Glenn (Steven Yeun) and babelicious Maggie (Lauren Cohan) clip-clopping on horseback to the abandoned pharmacy time and again for supplies, since they could have just grabbed an SUV and cleaned out the joint in one swoop.

The lulls also gave us time to decide which characters we were so fed up with that we'd dearly love to see a zombie posse tear them limb from limb. Tucker's pick for evisceration was Shane, who I wouldn't want to do without myself; mine is Rick and Lori's pie-faced son, Carl, whose slurpy nuggets of childlike wisdom got on my nerves. (I'd have swapped a dead Carl for a live Sophia anytime.) But I ended up digging the long halt anyway. After all, The Walking Dead owes a lot to Westerns—think of zombies as Sitting Bull's ultimate revenge on us dumb invaders—and this was the homesteader version, all about learning new habits in a temporary refuge that isn't as tranquil as it looks.

Besides, the whole arc did have, you know, themes, from class (Michael Rooker as redneck Daryl's phantasmal big bro' warning him that he'll always be trash in the others' eyes) to loners finding their potential soulmates (Shane/Andrea, Daryl/Carol, Glenn/Maggie). Not only did the sparring between atheist Rick and Bible-toting Herschel tackle the nature of religious belief more explicitly than American TV's norm, but Herschel's unbending belief that zombies are still people chimed pretty subtly with Lori's hesitation about aborting the unborn baby she can't be sure is Rick's or Shane's. In any case, the payoff—the discovery of Sophia's fate, Shane's usurpation of Rick's authority, the massacre of the walkers in the Greene family's barn—made the long buildup worth it.

For my money, these new resonances and intimate undercurrents have made The Walking Dead more interesting, not less. But that's obviously not the case for the sizeable share of the audience that tunes in primarily to see our gang in peril and squads of shambling ghouls getting ornately blown away, which makes this season's shift in priorities a risky one as well. (Pleasing me is, let's face it, no great recipe for success in the horror game.) I enjoy a good zombie slaughter more than anything except football, but I'm still most likely to get hooked on this kind of tale when it clicks at other levels, too—as an unexpected set of metaphors and parallels for real-world fears and dilemmas, not just scary post-apocalyptic hoo-ha for scary post-apocalyptic hoo-ha's sake. Better a soap opera than a video game, I think, but it doesn't surprise me that plenty of Walking Dead fans are in it for the video game and chafe at the exact same stuff I'm getting off on.

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